Jennifer Ida ’12 was recently awarded the immensely prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and will be enrolling this fall in the anthropology graduate program at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Ida, an anthropology major with dual minors in Spanish and microbiology who graduated last May magna cum laude, was one of two student researchers who worked with professors Celeste Gagnon and Nick Richardson on the “Chicha Project,” brewing native Peruvian beer to help pinpoint the age of fossil remnants of early South American peoples. For more about the Chicha Project, read the story in our Newsroom.

The NSF Graduate Fellowship program is highly selective. They received 13,000 applications this year and awarded 2,000 fellowships; of these, Ida was one of only 145 granted to students who were not already graduate students at the time of application.

Of the 2,000 awards granted this year, 52 were granted to students pursuing graduate work in anthropology. Among these anthropologists, Ida was one of 21 focusing on biological or biocultural anthropology — and, in that group of 21, one of only 8 not enrolled in graduate school at the time of application.

The award provides a $30,000 stipend and $12,000 for tuition per year for 3 years.